Pick Your Winning Data Warehousing Team

David Haertzen, First Place Learning.

Getting the right people involved in your data warehousing and business intelligence project is critical to the success of the effort.  Categories of people that are needed include: executive supporters, business users and technical team members.  When you have read this article you will have greater insight into finding and recruiting the kinds of people needed to make your data warehousing project a success.

First, you need executive supporters and in particular an executive sponsor.  The right executive supporters will ensure that funding is provided and that the organization follows through with the actions and “political will” to succeed.  The ideal data warehousing executive sponsor will have a stake in the success or failure of the effort while having sufficient authority to obtain resources and to enlist the support of the rest of the organization.  Enterprise level BI typically requires a more highly place executive sponsor that a departmental data mart. In order to find the sponsor you may need to enlist the help of key business users who can sell the idea of data warehouse upward through their part of the organization.

Second, you need to have key business users, sometimes known as BI champions, in your corner.  These important business people believe that BI can help the organization and have good ideas about how those benefits can be realized.  Often the BI champions are “power users” who understand the organization’s data as well uses of that data.  For example, the BI champion may be a marketing manager or analyst who needs data to improve marketing campaigns.  This marketing BI champion can help to sell the approach to the marketing management who can in turn educate executive management.

Finally, you need technical team members to create a working solution.  A number of skill sets are needed.  First, enterprise architects are needed to layout the infrastructure for the data warehouse – recommending hardware and software platforms.  Second, business analysts are needed to translate business requirements into a form that the technical team can understand.  Third, data architects are needed to design databases and the data flow required to populate the data warehouse.  Fourth, Extract Transform Load (ETL) developers are needed to build processes that populate the data warehouse.  Fifth, Quality Assurance (QA) specialists test the system.  Sixth, BI developers create queries, reports and other analytics to directly support the business.

In conclusion, the successful project needs the right executive backers, key business users and technical team members to succeed.  Now you have a better understanding of what kind of team must be assembled to produce the desired results for your data warehousing and business intelligence project.